One of my greatest aims is to make Whitechapel a nexus for Desirable Information.

Memes, virals, that which makes you laugh, that which makes your bowels weep; anything found or scavenged online which has no informative value: that stuff will continue to go in “Around The Net.” I’ll be updating that once every four weeks too.

This…? This is for everything else.

News Stories. Mad Science. Horrific Nature. Metaphysical madness.

Here is where we gorge ourselves on the creamy clostrum of Information. Here is where we nuzzle at the red-raw teat of the Up-To-Date Dataweb. Bring me the light of your Weird Wisdom and your New News.

(Anything of particular interest, go ahead and create new threads in this category to delve deeper.)

@The Mighty Foamhead: That was my first thought too, but they mention in the article that the $1M would only get you to phase 2 trials, and because they've published enough to be unpatentable, they couldn't then get bought up by someone who was willing to fund phase 3. Not to mention that it could easily just not do anything in humans.

The treament involves injecting a capsule into the abdomen containing brown fat (the good type of fat cells that burn glucose to raise the body's temperature) and white fat cells engineered to lack an enzyme required for the development of visceral fat. (Fat aound the abdomen is really, really bad for you and the amount of visceral fat a person has is a much better indicator of health levels that total amounts of fat.)

The brown fat and the modfiied white fat cells apparently convert the visceral fat cells into other less harmful forms of fat. The result is an average reduction of 20% in visceral fat and an initial drop of about 10% in weight although some of that coems back later.

Tests on large animals start soon and assuming they go well this will probably be being tested in humans within a few years.

This isnt to lessen the tragedy but the shooting case in France has just brought home to me how much the news is framed in fictional narrative forms. The whole shape of the reveal and the cast of characters feels like it has been shaped by a script writer.

There have been news helicopters circling the research park where I work because the company the father worked at (as a contractor) is on it, and the police asked us to close the entrance so press cars couldn't get in. Therefore, helicopters.

No idea what they thought they could learn by taking footage of a building, but that's the rolling news for you.

The officers found Powell's body on the couch of the Requa home. His chest was cut open, and his heart, tongue and the skin of his face were gone, court records said. His heart was found charred in a wood-burning stove.

An autopsy determined the organs had been removed while Powell was still alive, the documents said.